Race: Go Beyond Racing’s Mt. Hood 50K
Location: On the Pacific Crest Trail and around Timothy Lake, in Mt. Hood National Forest, about 1.5 hrs from Portland, Oregon and at about 3,225 ft above sea level
If you follow me on Strava or Instagram, you might have noticed that I haven’t been doing a ton of running lately. I had the Bayshore Marathon a month ago, and then the Ultimate Direction Golden Gate Dirty 30 the following week (my first ultra! — here’s what I ate and wore). Since then, I’ve been in recovery/rest mode and adjusting to the heat of the summer. And eating Hello Fresh. But I have some news!
The ultrarunning world has its own lingo, its own customs, its own podcasts, its own “major” races, its own stars, its own running clubs. It also has its own website: ultrasignup.com.
For the past few months, I’ve secretly held an account on Ultrasignup, lurking in the background without actually having run or signed up for an ultra race on the site. In other words, even though I’ve run a good bunch of trails, and even though I’ve fallen and gotten “best blood” on a run or two, and even though I took an official rite-of-passage full immersion dunk in the swimming hole with a crew of badass trail runners this past summer in Southwest Virginia, and even though I ran in Colorado in the dark and in the snow for the last few months of 2016, I am not an ultrarunner. I’m a wannabe, a noob, an interloper, a poser. But that’s going to change…
athlettuce 